You've already taken the first big step towards profiting from affiliate marketing and joined us here!
You should find a good product that is being announced here, productcalendar.com, the Warrior Forum, or anywhere else and focus your efforts on it. Don't subscribe to every JV promotion you come across. If you see what looks like a big launch, it'll be flooding inboxes and creating huge buzz across the IM world in which case you'll have people searching on google for it.
What you should do is to use web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Youtube, etc. to create content that all links back to your bonus page. Create reviews, posts, videos about the product and your bonus and soon you'll be able to have tons of incoming links that'll boost your bonus page up the google rankings for the specified search keywords (e.g. "product x bonus"). The great thing about this method is that it's virtually free unless you purchase a domain and hosting.
That's a basic outline of this method. The other great thing about this method is that you don't need a list at all to get started.